Friends
Adding friends doesn't just allow you to easily contact people you know. There are a variety of benefits with impact on the game. You should aim for at least 25 active friends with Level 6 or higher Space Station. The Friends Screen To open the friends screen, navigate the HUD by clicking the Social button, then the Friends button. This screen lists 5 friends per page, including their online status. You can mouse-over each friend's name to bring up a selection menu. Options include: *Check: Takes you to the player's planet. You can then click the Space Base or Galaxy buttons in the HUD. These allow you to access their orbital view where you can see their fkeets and defenses, or view their neighbours and access the player's statistics screen (click their planet in Galaxy view). To return to your own planet, hit the Return to Homeland button in the HUD. *Invite: *Compose: Takes you to the mail screen, with a new send message addressed to your friend. Just type a message and send. *PM: (Available only if friend is online.) Clicking this option will start a PM to the selected player. This is the only way you can initiate a PM conversation without clicking a person's name in chat (i.e. when they say something first, or were featured in a system message for winning a prize, etc). *Delete: Deletes the player from your friends list. Adding Friends You can add new friends in any of three ways. #Through chat: If you see the player's name in chat (i.e. when they said something, are under attack, etc), you can click their name then click the Add option. #Through the player info box: To access this box, click on the player's name (found in chat, corps roster, auction house, mail, etc.), then click the Check option. Then click Add as Friend. #By player ID: From the Friends screen, type the player's ID number (found in the player info box) into the field at the bottom, then click the Send Friend request button beside it. Any of these methods will send a friend request. If the player is online, they may choose to accept or decline your request. If they accept, you will receive a notification pop up and they will appear in your friends list. Similarly, you may accept incomming friend requests by clicking Accept in the notification pop up. Friends with Benefits There are several benefits to having friends. Most of these are active, which means doing something to your friend benefits you (and sometimes them). Others are passive and require your friend to do something to you. #'Speed up building construction:' You can "Check" your friends planet as described above (must be done through the Friends screen) and speed up their building construction times. To do this, go to the friend's planet view and click the blue/yellow "up" arrow beside each construction in progress on the right side of the screen. Each one you click will take off 2% off the remaining build time. You can click once for each building per friend, but there is no limit on the number of buildings you can accelerate. I.E. if you help finish 5 buildings and the friend starts 5 new buildings, you can accelerate those too. Each one of the player's friends can help out, which adds up quickly and is very significant once buildings start taking over 200 hours to build. However, there is a limit to the total time discount per building. Currently this limit is untested, and it's unknown whether it's based on a percentage of the total build time or number of friends clicking, but it's at least 20% of total build time or 10 clicks. When you enter or leave someone's planet, it will tell them in chat. If you see a friend entering your planet, be sure to pay them back by helping with their buildings too. #'Base construction:' Once your space station has been "repaired" by 8 different friends, and once 24 hours have elapsed, you may harvest 8 vouchers from the Subsidiary Territory screen. Vouchers can be used to speed up construction and technology/blueprint research. Additionally, claiming your vouchers is one of the daily quests, and helping 5 friends with their base construction is another daily quest. Base construction is accomplished in the Subsidiary Territory screen by clicking a friend's name that has a flashing yellow wrench icon, then clicking their space station. #'Harvest unclaimed resources: ' Each player may build a number of resource "comsats", or asteroids, around their space base in the Subsidiary Territory screen. How many you can build depends on the level of your space station, and increases at two comsats per level up to 12 at level 6. There are four different sizes of comsats for both metal and He3 resources. These have different yields and maturation periods. Once a comsat matures, its owner may harvest it for free resources. But if the owner delays harvesting after it has matured (usually because they are offline), a friend may harvest it to get about 15% of those resources for himself. This does not affect how much the owner gets once he harvests. Up to 4 friends may harvest each matured comsat before it is depleted and no other friends may harvest. When harvesting from your friends it will cost you 1 SP per comsat, so it is best not to waste SP on anything but the largest (AKA "special") comsats. You can build special-sized comsats from day-1, so there's no reason to disappoint your friends with low-yield ones - they'll unfriend you. Harvesting 5 comsats per day will complete one of the daily quests. SP points are replenished every day at midnight (server time). Except for sending fleets to fight PvP, there is no better use of SP points than harvesting friends' comsats for free resources, so try to get enough friends that you can use up all your SP daily. You can also use common SP cards (which you get from daily quests and the wheel) to get more SP if you run out. Frienemies At higher stages of the game it becomes more important to be aware of who you add as a friend, especially if your corps is at war. Friends have access to view your orbital defenses and defending fleets, which is better than any scout ship. If you have members of an enemy corps in your friends list, it may be wise to remove them, unless you're the one doing the spying and are considering attacking them. Some players will also have secondary accounts unassociated with an enemy corps for this purpose. When you're at a more advanced level of the game and the stakes are higher, you should be careful when adding new friends, especially those that don't have much time invested in their account. However, this is usually not an issue in your first month or two of game play, and you don't want to sacrifice all the benefits of having enough friends to harvest as many resources as possible. So don't get paranoid over it. To start, friend anyone you can. Try to add everyone in your corps and in ally corps. Then clean up your friends list when you think you have enough allies added, and go through it again every once in a while.